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5 Lessons Learned from 100,000 Usability Studies

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community.The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not
reflect the views of Moz.

It happens all the time.

People get confused, frustrated, and angry while using websites. They sigh, they groan, and sometimes they even shout. I see it happen with my own eyes each and every day.

Over the years at UserTesting.com we’ve literally watched hundreds of thousands of usability studies, which gives us a unique perspective into some of the most common issues that impact users. I’d like to share five of those insights with you.

1) Avoid multi-level navs

The person in the video below is struggling to move her mouse through multiple levels of navigation. Just when she thinks she's made it to the item she's looking for, the entire navigation disappears. We see this every day on many different sites and it always frustrates the users.

This person is having a hard time using the site's navigation.

A fix to consider

One possible alternative to this type of navigation is to take an approach similar to Amazon.com, and have an entire section pop out.

On Amazon.com, the entire section pops out.

This approach makes life much easier for your visitors. Not only does it remove the need for them to delicately maneuver their mouses, but it also lets them see all of their options at once. Plus, it gives you the freedom to add images and other styling to your nav.

For other possible solutions, and a more in-depth look into creating easy-to-use navigation, check out these resources:

2) Your categories might be confusing users

As the video below illustrates, the way we categorize things on our websites might be confusing our visitors. In fact, it's one of the most common things we see in all of our user tests.

A person looking for a small vacuum for under $50.

In this particular study, it took our participant 48 seconds to find the category for a small vacuum. She started her search by looking in "electronics," then browsed for something called "household," and finally made her way over to "Home & Garden."

At this point you're likely thinking one of two things:

Either, "Silly person, it's obvious that a vacuum would be in the 'Home & Garden' section."

That's why I need to introduce you to the "Matt-Damon-and-Good-Will-Hunting-Can-Do-No-Wrong" principle.

The principle is simple: it's not your fault. (Side note: if you don't understand this reference, then do yourself a favor and watch this video.)

It's not your fault. It's not the user's fault. It's not the designer's fault. In fact, it's nobody's fault. What's crystal clear to you might be confusing to me, and no one is to blame for that. It's just something we have to work with.

So, what do we do about it?

One of the best ways to test out your site categorization is to sit someone down in front of your site and ask them to find a specific item without using internal search. This is simple, fast, powerful, and very painful to watch.

You're bound to see people struggle to find things that seem obvious to you. When this happens, remember the "Matt-Damon-and-Good-Will-Hunting-Can-Do-No-Wrong" principle, make some changes to your categories, and then test again.

Another way to improve your categories is to use a tool like OptimalSort or TreeJack. OptimalSort is an online card sorting tool that makes it easy to find out how people think your content should be organized. Then, once you think you have everything organized nicely, TreeJack helps you prove that this site structure will work.

3) Internal search is crucial (and frustrating)

There's a good chance that 10% of your site visitors are using your internal search. When they search for your most popular items, do you know what the results look like?

From all our studies, we've found four common types of problems with internal search:

Search results that don't account for typos, plurals, hyphenations, or other variants

A search box that isn't long enough

Search results that simply don't make any sense

Search results that aren't sorted by priority

To see an example of #4 in action, let's watch yet another person looking for a vacuum:

When results aren't sorted by relevance, people are bound to see some weird things.

Because the search results are automatically sorted by "Most Popular," the first results are for replacement batteries and filtration paper bags! Yikes! Or, as my 10th-grade Spanish teacher would say, "que barbaridad!"

If you do only one thing

If you do only one thing, look at your internal search logs and find the top 10-20 keywords that people are searching for on your site. Search for each of these items yourself to see if you're happy with the results.

Then, search for your company's 10 most important products. How do those results look?

Lastly, look for some generic, non-product terms. For example, if you're an e-commerce store, search for "returns," "contact," and "hours." Looking good?

If you can perfect these searches, and change your search results to automatically sort by relevance, you're most of the way there!

4) Links should look like links

As obvious as it sounds, there are many times when links actually don't look like links. And, as you probably guessed, this means users don't know they can click on them.

In the video below, this person is requesting a link to the "basic uploader" without realizing that "basic uploader" is already a link:

"Okay, that's frustrating. It would make more sense to me that you'd have a link that I could just click on."

What does a link look like?

This won't come as a big surprise, but to make your visitors happy, links should be colored and underlined. And, ideally, there should be different colors for links that have been visited and unvisited.

5) Engage your visitors (in other words, don't be boring)

Sometimes websites are perfectly usable — they have great navigation, clear categories, helpful internal search, and links that look links — but they suffer from a major problem: They're boring.

Or, put a nicer way, they're not engaging their visitors. People use the site, and they could easily buy something if they wanted, but they don't feel a connection to the brand or the product. Frankly, they just don't care.

In the video below, a person is trying out a mobile app for the first time ever. Listen to the deep sigh she makes and the tone of her voice:

The sound of boredom.

That's the benefit of watching someone use your website, app or product. You can hear their tone of voice and pick up on things like boredom that you'd miss if you were just looking at standard analytics data.

It's tempting to always get wrapped up in analytics or usability, but don't lose sight of engaging your visitors and building your brand.

Tunnel vision

These are only five of the issues that we see pop up often, but really there are countless ways that our websites can be turning off our visitors.

Thanks to the amount of time we spend on our own sites, we're blind to many of the issues that are confusing or frustrating our users. We have tunnel vision.

This is what we look like. Unfortunately, most of us aren't this adorable.

That's why it's so important for us to get our sites in front of real people with fresh eyes who can give us unbiased feedback. While this feedback is probably going to be painful to hear, it's going to help us all improve our sites and make the web a better place.

About Phil Sharp —
Phil is the Senior Marketing Manager at UserTesting.com -- the fastest, cheapest way to find out why users leave your website. You can follow him on Twitter at @IAmPhilSharp.

57 Comments

I don't know how many times I've tried to talk someone out of tiered navigation in Q&A. People don't just get confused and frustrated - half the time, they don't even know those extra options exist. So, you've added a ton of JavaScript and HTML to your download times, you've added a ton of links (and potentially diluted your internal link equity), and usually you've gained little or nothing, just because you think everything is important. When everything is important, nothing is important.

Today, You have made my day! I am Ecommerce guy and dealing with similar issues on my website. I want to give quick insights and ideas on it.

Multi level navigation: I am 100% agree with it. Recently, I have made similar change on website.

Categorization: Generally, I would like to follow Google taxonomy sheet to make it happen. I will sync similar categories on my website to reduce confusion and gain user experience. Anyone can give me more inputs on it.

Internal search: I have stated work to gather internal search URLs via Google analytics and identify bad search result. We are working on Magento technology and easy to track catalog search page via Google Analytics.

So true about the tunnel vision! It's so natural for us tech savvy folks to just want to change things from our computer screens without getting out in the real world to see how actual visitors are reacting to our sites. You may not think you have the resources to do that sort of thing but it can easily pay off with big takeaways like the ones mentioned here. Setting up some A/B testing is a really helpful way to identify improvements in responses to your site, but you still have to know what changes to try!

You're exactly right Joshua! Analytics is great for telling us WHAT happened, but user testing is one of the few tools we have that can tell us WHY things are happening.

And user testing definitely doesn't need to be resource intensive. At its simplest, it's really just watching people use your product or website. As long as you can find some people, you can do some user testing :).

Another one I would add is having the contact page/information clearly visible. We have seen it all: contact buttons that don't give any information just prompt an email to open; contact page hidden within the site-map; contact page that looks cluttered; missing information.

If the end goal is for the viewer to get in touch with you, then make it quick and easy for them to do so.

That doesn't necessarily mean it has to be boring. We are currently testing a drop down contact box instead of just having you go to the actual page!

Nice post. I think that we can look at some of these conclusions and think that they're rather obvious - but the fact that people come across them time and again means they're not to a lot of people out there building websites. As you say in Lesson 3, what can be clear for some people is cloudy for others.

Card sorting to work out categories is a new one for me, and definitely something I'll thin about using in future projects. Would you say it would work if you and the client went through the exercise rather than their customers? I know the results wouldn't be as strong, but I'm thinking about budget-concious clients.

It would be really good to see some statistics about the lessons. The title of the post brought me here because it talked about Lessons From 100,000 USer Studies, so to have something like "73,000 of our delegates saw sites with multi-level nav, and 20% had problems" would be great.

In my opinion, card sorting is going to give you the best results when used with people who don't have the tunnel vision that we get when interacting with our sites all of the time. Optimal Workshop (the folks that make OptimalSort) have some really affordable plans that are worth checking out. I definitely think it's worth the money.

However, another possible option could be card sorting with folks at a coffee shop, airport, or anywhere else you can find people with time on their hands :).

Yeah, I definitely get that people who don't have tunnel vision (clients, tunnel vision? Who would have thought.) are best to look at card sorting. I reckon you've just solved my problem of what to do when I'm waiting to catch my plane next month ;-)

The site search tip is fantastic. Time after time, I see visitors who use site search convert better than those who don't. If you want to increase conversions, focus on site search and the results that are shown. Such an easy win but it hardly ever gets prioritized.

Nice Post! I believe the reason why people come across usability problems when they find a website different then the common pattern r may be a difficult than the normal one!

What websites should be doing to reduce this type of errors is to keep things really simple and before finalizing the website they should reaching out to people who are not the part of the website development process and let them use the website and make changes on basis of their results!

What most website owners should understand is that website beauty and search engine is important but no more than the user itself!

Actually, I reckon the important part is not getting external reviews once a website has been finalised, but recognising that there should be no such thing as a finished website. Too many businesses look at them as a one-time investment when they should be striving to improve performance, both with Google Analytics and on-page tools like Crazy Egg (to identify where they may be a problem) and with usability testing (to identify why there is a problem).

The issue of internal search could be so frustrating with many sites out there. Thankfully, this issue has been highlighted in this post and I guess many sites will take cue and make the necessary corrections.

For any who aren't aware, you can track site search activity within Analytics to see exactly how well it's working for you (so long as your search uses a GET parameter such as www.example.com/search?s=my+search+term. S being the parameter you'd tell Google Analytics to track).

You can set it up by going to Admin Then View Settings under your property then fill in the details under Site Search Settings. I also like to include an event on pages where no search results are tracked which is tied into an email alert for when search failures are high; if people aren't finding what they need then I need to investigate my search functionality.

Mega navs have always been a pet hate of mine however it's usually down to the hundreds of links they add to a page and poor implementation; if done right like Amazon then I imagine they can be extremely helpful.

Hey Phil - great post. Interesting your top 3 items are all about navigation and IA. Do you guys have any data on what your customers actually change after they use your tool? IA and site nav is the most expensive (and lets be honest, highest risk) to update.

My gut feel is a lot of crappy nav / search structures remain as they are too hard to change - and this is all the more reason for putting extra effort into getting them right first time. Would be amazing to see some data around this!

I can't tell you how many times I've been frustrated with a site's popup menu! Amazon's, like you said, is very easy-to-use.

The first four things you point our are pretty easy to fix and perhaps a lot of websites have that under control, or at least can have that under control painlessly.

The last one however, to me, is the golden nugget from your post. Making their website engaging for the customer is probably the biggest challenge faced by any business. It also boils down to having a great USP - selling your business to your customer in 2-3 seconds(that's how much the average attention span on the net is, right?). Get your USP under control - like "User Research Results In 1 Hour" - and you've got your visitor hooked.

I've used the Premium WP plugin UberMenu and can say it is an awesome mega menu option. Full disclosure: I have no relationship in any way - just a great plugin/Menu option for those looking for a clean experience. Support has been fantastic as well.

Very very useful and nice post, truly amazing with the example videos, thank you. I really like amazon.com menu suggestion and the search results test in a site. I also like a navigation system as in theinternetmostwanted.com site.

I think that people are navigating sites very fast and anything that can lower the amount of time spent finding things will be translated into higher conversions. Thank you again for this great post!

The videos in this were awesome, awesome, awesome - as painful as it was to see and listen to the frustration, it was so eye-opening. It's really revealing to have people try and complete a task, especially when we stare at the website all day long and know how to use it ourselves, and not be able to do very simple things.

The videos in this were awesome, awesome, awesome - as painful as it was to see and listen to the frustration, it was so eye-opening. It's really revealing to have people try and complete a task, especially when we stare at the website all day long and know how to use it ourselves, and not be able to do very simple things.

One more way by which usability and profits can be increased is with help of Market Basket analysis. This analysis is mainly used in retail stores but can be useful for online stores also. Market Basket analysis provides information to understand the purchase behavior of a buyer. Example-Customers often purchase shampoo and conditioner together, so there is chance for developing cross-promotional programs or capture new buyers which will significantly increase profit and usability.

This past week Bed, Bath & Beyond's site (www.bedbathandbeyond.com) switched from the cumbersome multi-level global nav to large, 2-dimensional drop-down panels. This was part of a massive redesign effort that included changes to the homepage, listing pages, and product detail pages. Let me know what you think. I'm anxious to see how their customers react.

Through the years "pop terms" emerge to describe this concept. A few years ago we had "don't make me think" now a lot of marketers are saying "your user is drunk" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2CbbBLVaPk . I've always said "Why does this site exist" ... Basically we are all saying the same thing: YOUR WEBSITE NEEDS TO BE STUPID-SIMPLE"

You need to be easy to use, relevant to your target audience and interesting. If you focus on those things, you'll be fine. :)

This is a great post. A lot of designers don't think so much about how easy it is for other people to search for something on the site they are creating. As long as it makes sense to them, it will make sense to everyone else. I really enjoyed reading this one. Thanks for posting!

The diversity of websites is usually one of the main things that makes them so confusing in my opinion. With so many people trying so hard to build and design websites in such a way that makes them stand out makes it so that people are often bombarded with hundreds of different ways to do similar things. It doesn't help that a lot of people may be new to the internet as it is (no offense but generally the older generations) and won't be able to pick things up as quick.

Hi Phil, you highlighted the internal search options and it woulde be really helpful for the ecommerce websites. I guess some of the parameters fixed in search results that don't found the exact query. Might this tip make better search results.

I believe conversion rate depends on the usability of the website. I have very simple formula - i just assume myself a visitor and findout the points where the usability of my website lacks. Apart from SEO friendly, our major concern should be on usability by developing our website simple and user friendly.

Thank you for this! #4 really gets to me. I'm very much a clicker and not a reader, so I would definitely be just like that lady, not able to find the basic uploader even though it's *right* there! If you want someone to know what to do, make it super, dumb, easy for them to figure it out. :)

I like hedgehogs, and hedgehogs doing funny things even more. Thanks for the article even though most SEO's know this we get focused and it is good to remind ourselves of the basics. I always tell my clients the first 15 slots we jump on Google are the easy ones because they usually can be achieved with some basic website fixes (depending on keywords naturally). It is the next 15 that are tough. I think many sites could see vast improvements in user experience by keeping some of these tips in mind.

While I Was Expecting to Learn some advanced SEO Tactics , Iam quite frustrated to check in way too basics that every common SEO Analyst would definitely BETA TEST their sites before launch and Excuse me for the thumb down.